With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.
There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.
Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.
The events inspired characters that truly existed, as well as fictitious people I had to invent. Sometimes the harsh reality was too much, too absurd. This was the case with the story of the cat who roamed from one trench to another and in the film ended up being imprisoned. In reality, the tom cat was accused of spying and was arrested by the French army, and then shot according to regulations.
When I tried to play characters that strayed from who I am it ended in disaster. People didn't expect me in comedies or musicals.
You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.
A lot of times characters are combinations of people I come across in life. I people-watch a lot.
I like to do movies, because I love becoming different characters, and telling different stories through different eyes, and affecting someone's life in one way or another.
I had tears coming out of my eyes. And it was the characters that got me there.
In a book you can really talk about ideas and themes and characters in a deeper way than you can even on the screen.
We're being asked to continually be "authentic" and "honest" with the world through social media. There's a demand to post our wedding pictures, baby pictures (only minutes after the birth), our relationship status, and our grief and joys on Facebook and Instagram. Similarly, we construct persona through dating apps and networking sites. All of these social media networks exert pressure on us to share the personal details of our lives with unknown masses. So the pressure on the characters in "Openness" isn't merely romantic, but publicsocial as well.
I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
The big characters who occupy science, especially modern science, are all "off" in fundamental ways. I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think. I wanted to pay tribute to that mind.
It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.
I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.
I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it's over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth.
I've certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.
People can rock together, people can do great things together, and that's what you love when you're working with characters and it's all going well.